Photographer Chronicles The City’s Upheaval

During the removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus in Wooster Square on June 24, there was a moment that crystallized what it was all about. As city workers secured the ropes around the statue to lift it off its pedestal, it occurred to a few in the crowd that it looked a lot like a lynching, and in that visual echo, they found some restitution.

“Three whole minutes,” one spectator said, referring to how long the statue might hang in the air.

“Christopher Columbus is the new slave,” said another.

Photographer Leigh Busby’s image of that moment captures it all. There’s the view from the crowd, all too much like the camera angles of the countless historical photos of the lynchings of Black people across the South. The statue dangles from the end of its rope; because the crane is out of sight, it looks like it could have been strung up from a tree. The man witnessing it to the left, in a baseball hat and tank top, seems to convey the tension of the moment in his body language. The atmosphere feels somehow charged and still; it’s a moment of anger and resilience, when 400 years of history loops back on itself in a flash and returns us to the present, and everyone who feels the whiplash is hungry to figure out where we go from here.

The New Haven-based photographer has been attending and documenting the Black Lives Matter marches and protests in the city since they broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s killing on May 25. The Ely Center of Contemporary Art has given Busby some virtual gallery space to display his recent photos. The show, running through Aug. 2 — along with Busby’s photographs on I Love New Haven and his own internet presence, where he posts more photos — offers a searing snapshot of what’s happening in the streets. The show is powerful evidence that, in Busby’s photographic eye, unblinking, attentive, and humane, New Haven may have found one of the most important chroniclers of the city’s unrest of 2020.

“I was born in Trinidad & Tobago, a land located in the West Indies near Venezuela where almost everyone looked like myself — racism was not something I had to deal with, unlike my fellow black Americans,” Busby writes in an accompanying statement. ​“I came to America in 1972 and quickly had a rude awakening to racism as me and my brother went to a local grocery chain, SUPER SAVERS. We were grabbed on the way out by the manager and the police were called because he claimed he saw us put several pieces of steak up under our raincoats. He claimed to have actually eye-witnessed this, but when cops came, we had absolutely nothing on us (nor did we ever have anything on us.)

“There was our first introduction to what black Americans were speaking and protesting about, being mistreated and profiled while being constantly lied to by racist white Americans who hated them just because of their skin color. Man, this was painful. I began to experience this sort of racial attack on a regular basis — being stopped in stores, followed around malls, falsely detained by police saying I fit the description of an African American they are looking for — and of course, they are checking me out because I am black.

“Pushing forward to now, as I am an artist/photographer with a voice to express my pain, a pain most African Americans feel deep inside,” he concludes. ​“But thank God, I have this creative outlet to express my feelings to show the world. Politics is secondary to me, as I want to give voice to the inner person to be heard. I hope my work here inspires you to pick up a camera or some form of creative expression and share it with those around you.”

Busby’s personal desire to express his pain translates to an ability to find and convey the deep humanity within the Black Lives Matter protestors’ political actions. The emotions roiling in the air in Wooster Square on June 24 are plain to see on everyone’s faces — even when they’re half covered by masks.

And in the same crowd, Busby found moments of improbable and visceral tenderness.

In an image from Hamden’s protest, Busby captured the way the phrases ​“thin blue line” and ​“blue wall of silence” seem all too often to melt into one another.

And he finds the ways that George Floyd’s killing connected with everyone.

“I let the crowd go forward and stayed back to see what I could capture as an outside observer, and it worked,” Busby explained about his approach to the Wooster Square photographs. While his work may indeed inspire others to express themselves creatively, his own creative output, sharp-eyed and compassionate, has already amplified the voices of so many around him, and in doing so, captured what could be a pivotal moment in the city’s history.

See Busby’s photographs at The Ely Center of Contemporary Art’s website, I Love New Haven, and at his personal social media pages.